How to produce the £99 Android tablet

This year finally saw Android hit on a formula for success in tablets, and it centred around delivering broad mass-market capabilities at well under £200.

But with Google and Amazon already cutting margins to the minimum, or even subsidising their entry-level slates, how do you go even cheaper? The answer, it seems, is less glass, and cheaper commodity components.

Taiwan-based analyst firm TrendForce reasons that with companies the size of Google and Amazon already underwriting today's low-cost Android tablets to some extent, the only other way to reduce costs to the consumer is to opt for cheaper components.

And the easiest place to start, considering it accounts for 35-40% of the total material costs of a small tablet, is the panel-touch module combination.

Changing from FFS to TN panels is an established tactic for delivering cheaper displays, while Trendforce also reckons going from a glass-based solution to a glass/film/film module could contribute to a total $25 saving in overall costs from the display-touch panel combo.

The rest of the saving, we're told, can be centred around three components: memory, flash storage and the CPU.

Switching from 1GB mobile DRAM ($10) to 1GB commodity DRAM ($3.50) is the start, while 4GB eMMC NAND flash ($4) shaves a third off the price of an 8GB module. Lastly, lesser-known Chinese semiconductor makers will sell you a 40nm-55nm chip for around $12 apiece, which is potentially half what a more frugal CPU from a better-known source.

All that adds up to around $50 in savings, taking you from the $199 of the base Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire to the magical sub-$150 mark, which strictly speaking converts to as little as £92.

You're not left with much, to be fair, but c'mon, look at the price. The fact we're even talking of a sub-£100 tablet is impressive enough, but finding a formula for making one without having to subsidise half the asking price is even better.

Strikes me as odd seeing as the Nokia 5800 with a fast processor, more ram and newer version of the software than that on the N95 was comfortably jerkier and slower than the budget osf running gb. Mind you the N95 did only have a small low resolution screen to throw pixels around.

And be a long wait for a sub £100 tablet running ios, though mentioning bb does remind that the playbook has gone sub £100 too.

um yeah I've nfi what he's on about, pretty much every android device I've ever got my hands on has been better at multitasking than an N95, which is hardly surprising considering how old the N95 hardware and software is.